Dragon's Lair
The Dragon's Lair becomes available at level 40. Additional lairs become available at level 60, level 80, and level 90. Introduction You can—and should—run each level once/day for free. You can also reset, to run one of the levels again, for diamonds. The number of resets you can buy per day depends on your VIP level. There are three kinds of spaces: monsters, chests, and questions. When you finish all of the spaces, you get an extra chest. Buttons The bottom-right button opens the Options window. Here, you can switch levels or build set gear. Also, for some reason, the Options tab has buttons to bring up partial Talent, Forge, Equipment, and Formation windows. If you need to change your main skill or your formation between fights, this might be useful. When you complete a run, the same window pops up on its own, but it's hidden behind a completion popup, making it difficult to switch levels or build set gear. Just close the window, and use the button to reopen it, and now it will be in front of the popup. The other button at the bottom is to reset the level. You really never need this. If you've finished a level, you can use the completion popup to reset; if you haven't, you don't want to reset. Chest and Gear Chests contain fragments of dragon's lair gear appropriate to your main class. You need 10 (level 40), 20 (level 60), 40 (level 80), or 60 (level 90) fragments for each piece of gear. This gear counts as "orange", and can only be worn by your main character. It's generally better than the purple gear or Flare set gear of the same level. (The Druid may be an exception to this.) Plus, of course, it frees up your Legacy, Heroism, etc. gear to go onto another comp. Monsters and Health The monsters are normal fights. If you win, you proceed to the next step, if you lose, you have to repeat the same step. You get experience, but no other rewards, for each win. Either way, any damage you take in the fight is removed from your health pool. When the health pool reaches 0, you fail the dragon's lair, even if you've won every fight. You can see your remaining health percentage at the top, or the exact value on the Options window. Each level has a different health pool: 150000 for level 40, 250000 for level 60, 400000 for level 80, and 3050000 for level 90. For all but level 80, this should be enough that, once you can reliably beat all of the monsters, you will usually beat the level. For level 80, the pool is way too small; the last monster can do as much as two thirds of this in a single fight. So, many people can't reliably beat 80 until after they're beating 90. Healing counts, so bringing a priest or druid and/or using a healing skill on your main can help reduce the health loss. You can of course also reduce the losses by adding more block, dodge, or the appropriate kinds of defense, or by killing the enemy faster. Most of the monsters in the second half of level 80 use magic damage, and most people have low magic defense; you may want to try swapping in a few Brilliance crystals to reduce your health loss here. Questions and Answers The questions give you a choice of two answers, each of which provides different benefits. Most of the answers are self-explanatory. Hit points go to your health pool (which can go over 100% on level 40, but not on the higher levels). The actual hit point values you receive will be different from what's in the answers below, in some undetermined way. See Dragon's Lair Answers for a (hopefully) complete list of questions and answers. What to Reset What to reset depends on what you want: * Set gear: Obviously reset the level that has the gear you want. * Diamonds: Level 40 averages more than 20/run (assuming you choose the right answers), and all of the others are much lower. So, you're not going to make diamonds, but if you have to reset (e.g., for a "Beat Dragon's Lair X times"), level 40 will be cheapest. * Stamina: Level 40 has the best stamina rewards, level 80 also isn't bad, 60 and 90 are much lower. * Experience: The question rewards scale with level, and so do the monsters, so reset the highest one you can, unless you can't win most of the fights on that level. But dungeon resets are probably a better use of diamonds if you're after xp. * Rep or honor: The question rewards scale with level. * Gold: The question rewards scale with level, but they're tiny. You're probably better off resetting level 40 to make extra set gear to sell off. (This also counts as making a piece of orange gear, which people can send you greetings for, which means more gold.)